BIOSCI Administrator (biosci-help at net.bio.net) wrote:
: We will *not* be opening the system up to broadcast commercials as we
: believe that this is the quickest way to disgust scientists and stop
: them from participating in the newsgroups.
The bionet.jobs group has been an active service that is explicitly
advertising. I think it would be appropriate to impose a moderate fee
for posting in this forum. A posting fee would generate revenue and
discourage casual postings that were not serious opportunities. I
don't think $25 would be an excessive burden on job candidates or $100
for prospective employers. This is still alot less than the cost of
placing a classified in Science.
I also think there would be interest in a commercial "new products and
announcements" forum, particularly if it was associated with a
structured and searchable archive and web page. I object strongly to
ads appearing unsolicited in my email or in a scientific forum, but if
I have made the decision to look at a commercial forum, sure ads are
what I am looking for. This forum might carry the sort of
announcements that appear in the back of Science and Nature under the
"New Products" heading. A couple hundred dollar posting fee is still
alot less than postage costs to produce even a modest surface mailing.
What do the journals charge?
A final note: if you are going to establish a "registered subscribers"
database, copyrights, security and privacy will become issues. I
certainly don't want someone downloading (or you selling) the entire
list so that advertisers can bombard me with junk email! Sorry for the
dig about your possibly selling it, but over the years typos in my name
and address have allowed me to identify numerous instances where
prestigeous institutions of higher learning have done exactly that.
David States
Institute for Biomedical Computing / Washington University in St. Louis